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Monday, 19 October 2009

Sweater Mitts

This weekend has been most productive in the crafts stakes - and my fave project of the weekend is these fingerless mitts.

The story behind these bad boys is that a couple of years ago i bought a beautiful fairisle wool jumper-dress from the charity shop back home, it was 2 tones of grey and HUGE, and so the perfect candidate for a felting - or so I thought!

Now you see the problem is that in the UK we do not have top loading washing machines, so when you decide to felt something you are pretty much chucking it in and crossing your fingers for a good result! Sadly this jumper went from a large adult size to child in 1 washing cycle :(

So - not one to ever throw things away I was sure I could make something of this felting disaster eventually, especially as the fairisle pattern was still so pretty, and until now nothing had presented itself as a suitable projects, until i had the idea to make some quick fingerless gloves!

Basically it was a case of wrapping each sleeve (cut from the body at the armholes and opened out) around my hand, with the cuff at the top, to see how it would fit, making sure to measure the depth of the thumbhole and then pinning it together to the contours of my hand (easier said than done!) then carefully removing my hand and drawing this line (on the wrong side) with chalk so i knew where to cut and then sew.

For the thumbs i just cut 2 rectangles wide enough to wrap around my thumb (making sure it was deep enough to allow movement) and stitched them to the area marked out for the thumbhole, right sides together.

Then I cut the bottom ribbing off another felted disaster (I'm still on a learning curve here!) and stitched it, right sides together, to the bottom of the glove.

Finally I stitched the whole thing together from top to bottom, and then trimmed the thumb piece down to the knuckle so I can move it and Bob's your uncle!